No, it happened. And right when your song ended, I knew - just like your mother - I was a goner,' Peeta says.

Hey, look at this!" He holds up a glistening, perfect pearl about the size of a pea. "You know, if you put enough pressure on coal it turns to pearls," he says earnestly to Finnick. "No, it doesn't," says Finnick dismissively. But I crack up, remembering that's how a clueless Effie Trinket presented us to the people of the Capitol last year, before anyone knew us. As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.

Maybe I'd think that, too, Caesar," says Petta bitterly, "if it weren't for the baby." There. He's done it again.

It crosses my mind that Cinna's calm and normal demeanor masks a complete madman.

I drink in his wholeness, the soudness of his body and mind. It runs through me like the morphling they give me in the hospital, dulling the pain of the last weeks.

So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.

Every day when I wake I tell myself that it will be my last. If you are not trying to hold on to time, you are not so afraid of losing it... And then, if you make it to bedtime, you feel the joy of cheating death out of one more day.